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Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

asia.nikkei.com

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Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#191

Post by erichocean »

Aunche wrote: post #72
koheripbal wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of dishonesty around Westerners complaining about foreign cheap labor. They claim to be championing labor rights, but they are often just angered at companies for stopping all manufacturing in the West. They see it as an obvious weakness in their ideology that companies can just walk away from their labor movement and go elsewhere. The obvious truth, and what literally all of these Vietnamese workers w…

If you want to decrease inequality, it would make sense for people to be compensated for reducing inequality. This is what exactly what outsourcing is.

Outsourcing has dramatically increased inequality in the United States.

Try again.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#192

Post by hintymad »

mgraczyk wrote: post #19

A lot of comments here are criticizing Apple for chasing cheap labor. Ignoring for a second the fact that this has a lot more to do with geopolitics and hedging geopolitical risk, I think it's important to think more carefully about the impact of companies investing in developing economies. By and large, the factory work done by people in developing economies is dramatically better in terms of quality of life and saf…

Is cheap labor the driving factor, though? I vaguely recall that the labor cost alone in China has not been the largest competitive advantage as the cost has been increasing steadily over years. Instead, it was the complete supply chain in China that out competes other countries.

Bloomberg also reported an incident: Jobs wanted to change the cheap plastic screen to glass, and Foxconn was able to recruit more than 8000 workers overnight and completely reconfigured their assembly line to fulfill such request. This level of efficiency used to belong to the US. I really hope US can revolutionize its manufacturing for this century.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#193

Post by upupandup »

erichocean wrote: post #189
upupandup wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people complaining on Twitter that foreign cheap labour is being used are writing on devices that were produced by that same labour. Those very same people are the ones that are demanding that we bring those labour back but unwilling to brunt the cost that companies will then pass on to those same customer. It's not a strawman its the reality of Western society, whatever feels wrong is totally and completely deta…

> but unwilling to brunt the cost that companies will then pass on to those same customer HUGE "citation needed" here. Apple did a study years ago (when Obama was President) and the cost to manufacture iPhones in the US was well under 10% of the total cost, by their own calculations. The cost of labor in China has only gotten worse since then (hence the move to Vietnam in the OP).

> years ago

No longer the case obviously but more importantly, Apple studied themselves and found they were only saving 10% in costs? This makes no sense lol

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#194

Post by markdown »

hintymad wrote: post #192
mgraczyk wrote: post #19

A lot of comments here are criticizing Apple for chasing cheap labor. Ignoring for a second the fact that this has a lot more to do with geopolitics and hedging geopolitical risk, I think it's important to think more carefully about the impact of companies investing in developing economies. By and large, the factory work done by people in developing economies is dramatically better in terms of quality of life and saf…

Is cheap labor the driving factor, though? I vaguely recall that the labor cost alone in China has not been the largest competitive advantage as the cost has been increasing steadily over years. Instead, it was the complete supply chain in China that out competes other countries. Bloomberg also reported an incident: Jobs wanted to change the cheap plastic screen to glass, and Foxconn was able to recruit more than 800…

> ...This is level of efficiency used to belong to the US.

I doubt that.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#195

Post by erichocean »

bigcat12345678 wrote: post #173
fiftyfifty wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many of us would be more supportive of outsourcing manufacturing to developing countries if their government aligned more with Western ideals. The fact is many countries, like Vietnam, are still "developing" because they have authoritarian governments that have been oppressing their population to some extent keeping their labor cheap while stunting their economic potential. We see the problems with this situa…

Opression is necessary to development. Looking back for the cruelest opressions done by some nations towards American Indian, Asian, African in the early and haydays of industrial revolution. You are going to see opressions happening again and again in the future as well. It's just a natural process of society development.

> Opression is necessary to development.

That's one of the main theme's of Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Always nice to see how classy the HN comment section is.

Well done, everyone.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#196

Post by erichocean »

granshaw wrote: post #134
eej71 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, the decline in needing cheap labor is going to be a problem for large countries like China. China needed those cheap labor factories to be the engine to help lift people out of rural poverty. Unfortunately that engine will now falter and many will be left behind. For an eye opening survey here, I highly recommend the book Invisible China.

They are well on their way of climbing onto the next rung of the manufacturing ladder and manufacturing more complex items with higher margins that can absorb higher wages …and transitioning more to a service economy …no?

Not only is it "no", China is in a population loss spiral. It's estimated that their population will halve, from 1.4B to 700M, by 2050.

Everything they've built is beginning to fail due to lack of new workers, and an excess of non-productive people.

In a country where most people earn around $1000/year.

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#197

Post by alephnerd »

bigcat12345678 wrote: post #181
alephnerd wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 on Invisible China. Scott Rozelle's group at the FSI has been doing some good work on trying to alleviate the opportunity gap that exists in several prefectures in the PRC.

Xi Jinping know this problem all along. And his poverty eradication project is essentially siphoning embezzled fund from corrupted officials into rural areas. I bet Xi Jinping knows research work in the similar lines of Invisible China. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l... .

Rozelle's group at Stanford has consulted at the prefecture level with the CCP [0]. The PRC is de facto federal with a significant amount of leeway at the prefecture (state) level. In fact, a number of PRC policy initiatives are often done in coordination with research groups at Stanford University. The Guiding Cases [1] is another ministerial level initiative that Stanford has consulted on.

[0] - https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/reap/content/reap-home

[1] - https://law.stanford.edu/china-guiding-cases-project/

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#198

Post by [deleted] »

yrgulation wrote: post #49

At some point we should outsource our armies and perhaps even governments. If a real war starts we can use the services industry, unless we outsource that too. We’ll send the lawyers and software engineers in, and power our cardboard tanks with wood and steam. I was hoping the pandemic and the war in europe would teach us that electronics, particularly high end, should be relocated to allied countries at the very lea…

[deleted]

Re: Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

#199

Post by [deleted] »

mgraczyk wrote: post #19

A lot of comments here are criticizing Apple for chasing cheap labor. Ignoring for a second the fact that this has a lot more to do with geopolitics and hedging geopolitical risk, I think it's important to think more carefully about the impact of companies investing in developing economies. By and large, the factory work done by people in developing economies is dramatically better in terms of quality of life and saf…

[deleted]
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